Emergence

by Kathryn Wilder

For Ellen Meloy, TTW, and the Fluteplayer

1.

From my cot on a hill above the river, I listen as a flute plays into the dawning. Canyon wrens testing their own voices, grass stirring in a breeze as soft as the worn bamboo sheet that lines my sleeping bag, into the air rises a sound so foreign to the night yet so right, a longing, a lifting, quiet joy like a lover slipping into bed beside you, not asking anything of you but to understand the presence, the hello. I’m alone on my cot on a hill above the river yet not alone, a light-colored shirt and gray beard marking the man on the curve of the earth as the flute points here then there and then is gone, downcanyon, notes lingering like the scent of sage.

On a hill above the river I squirm into my sleeping bag, alone and not alone, the sheet draping what curves I have left as I write in the dawn as he played in the dawn and light grows around me, revealing the yawn of the canyon and the steep yet sloping yet grassy sides so different from my home canyon of pale red cliff, the sounds of river and flute and people rising and cheatgrass brushing the breeze bringing me awake to another day on the Snake in Hells Canyon. But I’m not ready for people yet. My voice is not ready.

Later in the morning I stand with the group near a stream hidden in hackberry trees and poison ivy, a pool marking the clearwater trail through twisted basalt, this rock so different from the Dakota Sandstone that lines my home creek, that water thick with salinity and alkali soil pushing through coyote willows toward a bigger river, and then the river. The Colorado.

I stand beside this pool and you ask what I think when I see a pool like this. 

“The pool and my body,” I say. 

I see a pool like this one and the water’s trek toward the greater Snake and the Columbia River that follows, or leads, to a mouth and the sea, and I think of the redrock of home and the people I have known there, the Coyote Clan, but not just the Coyote Clan, the women of the Coyote Clan. I see a pool like this one and I feel my body in the water and feel the friends I have known—the women—and I feel how we know that place we call home: the Colorado Plateau.

So when you ask what I think in the thick shade of hackberry trees, I say, “The pool and my body.”

You say, “Tell me more,” and I am coy (coyote) as I say, “Later,” and smile. You don’t see the slow swish of my tail.

2.

I have thought my life of late held the contours of Basin and Range topography, ups and downs made of wide valleys through which water often does not flow but collects and disappears into the Earth, valleys rimmed by mountains that reach toward the sky and slope away before touching it. Yet the other day as we drove and wound and wove through these eastern Oregon mountains I saw that in a simple matter of minutes I could reach great heights then fall as a rock to the bottom, to the base of elevation. No smooth curves for my emotions—just up and down, and down some more, until finally I arrive, as water does, at the lowest point. These steep mountains and five minutes of boathouse banter showed me this. A smile, a nod, a few man-woman words and I am the eagle, golden and brown and soaring; reality follows and the rock teeters and falls: I am sixty-four, no longer young and spry and fit, not like these boatwomen who carry us downriver, their futures always ahead of them.

So little to lift me up, even less to push me down. I am erosion in the making, as all elevation is. Is that why the river draws me—because it is at the bottom of the land around it? Or because it moves? In the Basin and Range, water does not move the way it does in my home desert—thunderous crashing rocking and rolling full-blown rage down to sweet gurgles in riffle and eddy; instead Basin and Range water often stays put in places without hope of change except as evaporation or a source of groundwater. In these other canyons and deserts and mountains and prairies and plains, the water goes somewhere else.

I have been on my way to somewhere else all my life.

I should not mind being a plummeting rock.

We stand beside a pool where the water of a tributary collects. You ask what I think when I see this pool, and I say the pool and my body. But I do not just think of my body and that water. I feel the water float around me like the soft fabric of a bamboo sheet; I feel the water welcome the weight and shape of me, no matter that I have fallen; I feel its touch on the inner parts of me—my heart. I feel my naked body move through water as I swirl and dance and twirl in that pool in my body and then I am out again, naked on sandstone, on redrock that holds the weight and shape of me, the air around me as light as the touch of a sheet, a palm, the sun, and I feel and I think and I remember.

3.

Hells Canyon is still being made, the slow uplifting of the surrounding Seven Devils and Eagle Cap mountains stretching toward the sky while the river pushes past dams and cuts deeper into the Earth through 150-million-year-old rock from underwater volcanoes, and six-million-year-old lava flows, through limestone from the ocean floor, alluvial deposits, even swamps from ages ago, the canyon itself the child of uplifting and erosion whose story is told in the language of elevation, and retold each day as side canyons add their own watery versions to the Snake, eventually to the Columbia, and to the sea. 

Although nearly as dry as my high desert, this country has water, and I wonder at each passing or crossing of creek what is the source of that water, for I cannot see from here the rims or mountains through which we twisted on the downward drive in. The spiral of road was lined with moist forests and I counted seven creek crossings but maybe lost track. I peed near one creek and the forest floor was already wet. Is there snow up there at the top? Runoff? Springs? Rain? Ah, rain! I am thinking in terms of desert water. Maybe this country gets rain enough to water the mountains and keep the streams flowing. 

Beside a tributary’s pool under the overhang of hackberry trees, in my mind I feel the touch of water and sunshine on my skin, and I remember. Something. So when you ask, I say, “The pool and my body.” I don’t say the women of the Coyote Clan because I am just remembering, like waking up, as the story slowly enters my consciousness like the notes of a flute at dawn.

4.

When I lived deep in red-canyon country near a river of blood, I had sisters of another kind, quick and smart and four-legged. Though raised by different sets of parents we drew together as a pack, first meeting in the coyote willows alongside the river and later, as we ventured out across the uplifts and synclines of our high desert, we met at spring-fed pools and common watering holes, our voices merging in song. 

We had leaders in our pack, elders who guided us then fell away, some to bad water, others to illness or age. The younger set had to step up then, and my sisters Em and Tempest did, their howls mournful and joyful and far-reaching. I tried to howl with them but got sick, a disease that lived in my blood making me too slow and tired to keep up. They raced on ahead, checking on me occasionally. Over time, Tempest, the youngest of us, scampered off to the farthest oceans, and then back and around and everywhere, because everyone wanted to hear her sing. Em, the older sister of our pack, covered country closer to home, traveling to our touched oceans and the deserts and waters of Baja. She brought back stories and I devoured them. My own stories held little color next to my sisters’, though I tried. 

Eventually the disease in my body reduced me to basic and simple actions—even to trot across the desert floor in hopes of a meal was a push—and I stopped trying to keep up, uttering only what I could, nursing my two pups along, and that was enough.

One spring I said a quiet goodbye to Tempest and her mate but Em was off on another adventure. I slipped away from the desert then, away from the canyons and river I loved—the river that fed us all and was our common ground—and while it hurt to leave, I found that in the temperate days of my new terrain my voice grew strong enough to howl at a different moon.

On the red earth of my new home, I lived near water in water on water, and though it tasted of salt and I could not lap long at its edges, I loved that sea. Moonlight over an ocean ripples on water that undulates forward and away, like me, I thought, here and receding. 

Like the song of a flute at dawn. 

Near a pool in a stand of hackberry trees and poison ivy you ask me a question that holds all this in its answer: coyote sisters, our story, the lives I have lived beside water, the saltwater of my blood and tears, the freshwater that still feeds me. 

5.

It was a sad time when my sister Em died in the night, the book she was reading dropped to her chest, her mate bedded beside her but unable to help, unable to restart the heart of his lover, though he tried. All her friends tried. In the end they carried pieces of her memory across slickrock and sandstone, sharing it so that others could still hear her songs, still learn the words. 

I fell out of touch with my younger sister after that, though I could follow from afar Tempest’s worldly travels and the stories she sent to the sky. They came back as rain and nourished and fed the land, hers a powerful voice of desert and that river we all loved, a voice that told of things gone wrong and what we might do to make the world right again. She sang of pain and hope and love. And we listened. 

I listened. 

Islands away I listened with my body in water. Under and in and on top of water I could hum and swim and feel the healing begin as the ocean carried the weight and shape of me. I sipped saltwater. I drank `olena. Turmeric. Plants and water working through me.

My pups grown, saltwater and chemotherapy curing my blood of its disease, my own voice strengthened and was known by locals in that far land as I intoned the stories of another clan. But there was something in me that teased and tugged—a tidal pull toward freshwater that drew me back to the coyote willows for my rebirth, the strength of gravity calling me home.

Healed in body but not of heartache—too many were walking on from our world to the next and with each went a piece of my heart—I sought out my remaining sister. She knew me by sight though it had been years. Her green eyes bright, her lustrous coat brushed with gray, Tempest said to me, “Are you back?”

Looking toward redrock canyons I sniffed the air, searching the breeze for the taste of our river. It was there. 

“Yes,” I said. “I’m back.”

“Good,” Tempest said. “We need your voice.”

Gathered beside a pool in hackberry trees, avoiding the touch of poison ivy on our skin, we respond when you ask our thoughts as we see the pool. Looking into cool, sun-dappled water, when it’s my turn I say the pool and my body, and I remember that part of my story held in the water of my being. My coyote sisters. That is what I see what I feel as I stand near the pool of water made of rain and snow and sleet and hail and springs and drips and drops in elevation caused by earth shifting and magma erupting, meeting air, becoming lava, turning to stone to basalt to baserock to bedrock to an earthen palm holding a pool of water on a steep slope above a river heading toward the sea.

6.

Back in the desert land of the Coyote Clan, I found a home in a den above a tributary to the Dolores River, which is a tributary to our big river—always by water. I sat near water and gathered my fragments and listened and wrote the words of canyon wren and raven, wind and silt and sand, of flood and drought. I sat beside water reading the words of my coyote sisters. 

While I lived quietly, time gathered in my bones, making joints stiff and standing up awkward at times. But I know I am not ready to walk on. I still have voice left to use. So here I lie beside another river—the Snake—listening to a flutesong and watching the slow movement of words collecting on a hill of grasses as light comes into a canyon and shadows rise. 

We gathered beside a pool rimmed with hackberry on a mountainside in the steep terrain of Hells Canyon, the deepest canyon we have in North America—deeper even than Grand Canyon, if you measure from outer rim to river—and you asked what we thought when we saw that pool. 

“The pool and my body,” I said, because I felt the pulse of water in my body, the throb of story in my being, the women of the Coyote Clan in the raw rock as we have always been.

7.

In the dawn of a new day, flute and canyon wren calling me awake, I wonder, is this how it was back then? Women washing clothes at the river, or scrubbing clay pots with sand, and they heard a new sound drifting into the canyon, an array of notes like the canyon wren’s pulling something up in them, some old feeling, and they lifted their heads, angling them toward the sound as if their ears could capture it better that way, like a mule deer doe’s ears pivoting toward danger but not always, sometimes toward fawns playing or the presence of a buck in their midst, and as the song moved down the canyon with the morning their hands stopped their work, all the women’s hands pausing in the air or resting on the bellies of pots or stone, whole faces turned toward music drifting; they were like summer’s sunflowers tracking the light, their lips parted, faces open, a look their own men might recognize upon returning from travel to hunt or trade, coming back with bounty of one kind or another, slain deer, an elk quarter, red cloth or shells from a faraway land the women knew they would never see but their faces held the wonder and later, in the night, their bodies would speak their gratitude, so glad their hunter or trader had returned safely, relaxing afterward knowing that families would be fed and clothed for days or weeks until the men would leave again—is that the kind of rapture that showed on the faces of the women by the river as the sound strengthened as the Fluteplayer drew near and they sat back, no longer bent in work, their hands moving to their hearts, their cheeks, open hearts, open mouths, ready to receive the song?

We stand beside the pool and you ask me what I think when I see a pool like this.  

The pool and my body. My body and the water. Coyote women—our bodies in water, on sandstone, in sunlight, the night, the heat and the shade, we are there, as close as we can get to the Earth, skin to skin, lust to love. Near a pool and its river in a whole different country my body knows the sweet touch of water, of sun, of stone. That is what I think. That is what I feel when you ask me. My body awake.

8.

We gather on the rafts the last night to hear stories under a half moon that hangs between canyon walls on a string of stars. The stories come from faraway lands and from the river, water like starlight like moonlight the common thread. There is a story of what washes up on the banks of a distant river, of a ring found and held on a finger, a circle of tiny stones. There is a story of a mother’s fear as her son goes to war, a circle of love. There is a love story of a man and his river, water holding him in lusty embrace. There is a young woman’s story of death and loss, and tears wrap around us like arms, and we are held together suspended above the river in a circle of tears that sparkle like gemstones on a found ring as starlight as moonlight touches the water of our hearts. I find the ocean on my cheek. 

Stories told, the Fluteplayer slips naked into the river and we follow one by one, first the women then the men, and I am the pool the body the weight and shape of it all as I dive under rise up twist and twirl and swirl and dance in moonlight in starlight that’s held in the night in the stars on the water, with me in water, on top of water, under water, in love.

When I leave the river I find no warm stone to hold me, just the air soft as a worn bamboo sheet on all my naked skin as I stand on sand and turn slowly and hold out my arms, hugging air. Air touching skin after water touching skin. I bask in the afterglow.

I am alone on my cot and not alone, the river running a stone’s throw near me, and I know that even in the night the pools in mountain streams bedeck their hills like gems on a treasured ring, and I know I have sisters in the Coyote Clan both alive and gone whose voices still reach the moon, and I know my own voice is here within me beside a river. At times that voice has been dry as the creek in my home desert—puddles cradled in caprock waiting for rain like desert toads, sound and sex ready to spring alive. 

I am ready to spring to life. My voice bubbles. It wants to sing. Instead, we sleep. In sleep the parts of me collect. I am a plummeting rock. A body of water. The heights and depths of elevation. I am words that fall in love like rain to land and sea and lift to the sky. 

In the predawn, the song of the Fluteplayer beckons. I rise and follow.

I am Coyote.

Singing.